Sell T-Shirts at Spreadshirt

Spreadshirt is the one of the largest sites that allows users to sell their own t-shirts. Their t-shirt designer allows you to add text to shirts or work from a company and community added database of images or upload your own. After you create your t-shirt just markup the shirt above the Spreadshirt markup to set your profit for each shirt that sells.

Spreadshirt has great print options, and good print sizes for custom apparel. Spreadshirt has been in the game for years, has been used by big corporations like Nissan, CNN, and The Guardian, has a huge user base, and carries a seemingly infinite resource of designs, clip art, and products. However, Spreadshirt lacks strong content curation, which leads to offensive and uncouth (think tshirthell.com) designs on their front pages, which clash with the clean, professional theme of the site.

Advantages

Free online storefront.

Use images from their database or upload your own

Large print areas on the shirts.

Can print in flex, flock, or glow in the dark. Rhinestones are also available.

Get paid by paypal (great for international users)

Shipping within 24 hours

Easy rss feed of your store.

Disadvantages

Only get paid quarterly

Each shirt has to be added one by one because there is no bulk feature which makes opening a large store tedious.

No directory of spreadshirt stores. Your individual products need to go into the marketplace.

Only allows 20 digital uploads and 20 vector uploads per day.

Paid Services

Premium
Offer premium stores that have no banners in the store but it costs $5 a month or $50 a year.

Premium Super
Allows you to remove all references to Spreadshirt logos. With this type of account you can also have unlimited vector graphic uploads. Costs $10 per month or $100 for one year.

Potential Commissions

Ability to markup the items to whatever you want over the Spreadshirt base price. So if the base price of a shirt is $15 and you sell it for $20 then you make $5 profit.

Opportunities

The opportunity to "get found" as an artist is rather low. They have been pushing the same "featured" stores for 5+ years. They don't really embrace the opportunity to show off or give exposure to rising artists. If you want to get exposure you need to bring your own traffic to your own store.

Summary / Future

Traffic is moderate through their marketplace.

They have been pushing a new API which has a ton of potential that may help Spreadshirt take a major lead in the t-shirt selling world.

Opportunity to get found?

The opportunity to "get found" as an artist is rather low. They have been pushing the same "featured" stores for 5+ years. They don't really embrace the opportunity to show off or give exposure to rising artists. If you want to get exposure you need to bring your own traffic to your own store.